Jonathan Glazer's Noble Speech and The Shame of His Critics
Glazer used his speech at the Oscars for his film about the Holocaust to decry both the October 7 violence and the genocide in Gaza. Pro-Israel hasbarists didn't like it much.
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It’s hardly news that there is a tremendous amount of dishonesty at play in the support of Israel and Zionism. But there has also been a sort of tongue-in-cheek sentiment among supporters of Palestinian rights—a sentiment that does sometimes actually come out in terms of advocacy—that the hard pro-Israel and Israeli right is preferable to the so-called liberals because the former is at least explicit and honest about its ideology and its goals.
When it comes to rank dishonesty, there are legions of examples. The latest is the repulsive faux outrage at Jonathan Glazer’s simple, noble statement at the Academy Awards Sunday night. Here’s what Glazer actually said:
“All our choices we made [in our film] to reflect and confront us in the present. Not to say ‘look what they did then’ — rather, ‘look what we do now.’ Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst. It shaped all of our past and present.
“Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people. Whether the victims of October 7 in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza — all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist?”
Glazer’s meaning is unambiguous and absolutely clear, especially if you just listen to him saying it. That is, it is clear if you have the slightest shred of honesty and are not seeking to twist words and remove them from context in order to smear a man who made a film to demonstrate the horrific consequences of dehumanization and made sure to elucidate the point on the biggest platform he could access in case anyone missed it.
Yet many supporters of Israel, a sizable number of them from the so-called “liberal Zionist” camp, led a crusade to distort Glazer’s words. Most of them simply focused either explicitly or implicitly on Glazer’s words, “We stand here as men who refute their Jewishness,” not only taking the words out of context, but literally stripping them of their actual meaning.
There has been a distressingly large wave of these bogus accusations. I will focus on three people who brought them: Batya Ungar-Sargon, a long-time huckster and current associate editor at Newsweek; Abraham Foxman, the former head of the Anti-Defamation League; and Michael Cohen, a columnist at The Boston Globe.
But first, let’s take a look at some contrast. Blake Flayton is a podcaster and social media personality. He is an unapologetically hawkish, right-wing, pro-Israel figure. I don’t think he’d quarrel with that description. Here’s how he responded to Glazer’s brief statement:
“Your Jewish identity is entirely connected to Israel, even if you ‘refute it.’ In fact, it depends on Israel. Without the lowly, icky Jews to compare yourself to, you oh Enlightened Jew, who finds meaning in our deaths rather than our lives, would have little Jewishness at all.”
Flayton’s tweet could be read as distorting Glazer’s words, but that was not his intent. He soon clarified: “I didn’t say he refuted his Jewishness I said he refuted that his Jewish identity is connected to Israel…”
Obviously, I completely disagree with Flayton’s points and, in fact, find them very troubling in many ways.
But say what you will, Flayton is genuinely engaging with what Glazer actually said. That immediately places him ahead of the others I mentioned. The others also have a much wider reach than Flayton does. What Flayton said was nasty, to be sure, but at least he didn’t lie about what Glazer said.
Batya Ungar-Sargon, who has a long history of fabricating stories and distorting words in order to fashion herself as some sort of free-thinker for PEPs (Progressives Except for Palestine) and liberal hawks who like to flirt with the right, chimed in with what was probably the most explicit and clear example of the dishonesty.
“I simply cannot fathom the moral rot in someone’s soul that leads them to win an award for a movie about the Holocaust and with the platform given to them, to accept the award by saying ‘We stand here as men who refute their Jewishness.’”
The shading here is impossible to miss. And it’s important to keep in mind, Ungar-Sargon is an editor at Newsweek, and formerly at The Forward’s opinion page. She did not misunderstand or misread Glazer’s remarks. She intentionally distorted them.
Then there’s Abe Foxman, former long-time head of the ADL, who literally made a career out of conflating anti-Zionism and antisemitism and trying to erase the line (a line which is VERY real) between Israel and Judaism. Foxman led the ADL as it spied on Arab-American and anti-apartheid activists, among other unsavory actions.
“I am pleased that Zone of Interest was won the best international film at the Oscars - but as a survivor of the Holocaust I am shocked the director would slap the memory of over 1 million Jews who died because they were Jews by announcing he refutes his Jewishness. Shame on you.”
Again, Foxman was the chief spokesperson for the ADL for 28 years. He knows how to read, and he knows the English language.
Michael Cohen has written a column for the Boston Globe for years, as well as having written various statements and reports for a variety of think tanks. He, too, cannot possibly use the defense of misunderstanding. (Full disclosure, both Cohen and Ungar-Sargon have blocked me on Twitter for calling them out on their respective shenanigans). He wrote:
“He actually used the words ‘refute their Jewishness?’ What a completely horrible thing to say.” When Washington Post columnist Shadi Hamid called him on the distortion of Glazer’s words, Cohen doubled down. “Did he not say the words ‘refute his Jewishness’? It’s right there in the video. Still trying to figure out what I allegedly got wrong here…”
What Cohen got wrong is obvious. Maya Angelou once said, “You will face many defeats in life, but never let yourself be defeated.” It’s a message of perseverance and hope. But if you just take the first part by itself, it becomes a bleak message of hopelessness.
That’s what Cohen, Foxman, and Ungar-Sargon, among many others did.
To make matters worse, Glazer himself was uplifting his own Jewish identity and the remembrance of the Holocaust. He was ennobling them, putting his identity and the memory of the iconic genocide in a place of sanctity, where they should not—in deed must not—be used to elevate the humanity of one people over another. Glazer explicitly brought in the memory of the victims of the October 7 attack to demonstrate that he was not singling out Israel, but was talking about the monstrous result of dehumanization, regardless of who was the aggressor and who the victim.
Some have criticized Glazer for, in their view, implying that “the occupation was to blame for October 7,” or that Israel brought October 7 on itself and that this somehow justifies Hamas’ action. This is more disingenuity, on multiple levels.
Glazer was quite clear about the negative light he was casting on the October 7 attacks. Again, it was unambiguous. Nor does he in any way imply that Israel was to blame for those attacks. Of course, if Israel had stopped its dispossession, occupation, and denial of the basic rights of Palestinians years ago, none of this would be happening, and the history of however many years would be quite different. It is a well-worn, but still true, cliché, that all the violence, whomever commits it and whether it is justified or cross the line (as October 7 most certainly did, by a lot) stems from Israel’s dispossession of Palestinians and denial of their basic rights.
Israel’s defenders would surely argue that if the Palestinians abandoned violent resistance, terrorism or whatever term you use, there would have been an agreement. But that, while completely unfounded and untrue, is an argument for another time.
Glazer was bemoaning dehumanization and the extent to which the memory of the Holocaust and the Jewish identity that he implicitly holds very dear is used to contribute to that dehumanization. There may be people who truly misunderstood what he meant, and there are surely many who didn’t actually hear what he said and are running with the false interpretations they have come across.
But Ungar-Sargon, Cohen, and Foxman are not among those people. They willfully, intentionally, and maliciously altered Glazer’s words.
Perhaps even worse, they themselves are guilty of a terrible form of antisemitism, the conflation of Jewish identity with Zionism and, by extension, the entire Jewish people with the massive crimes committed by the State of Israel. Naturally, these defenders of those crimes do not see it that way, but in any case, they have no right to make this conflation.
Glazer stood up for a principle, one learned through Jewish history but also through other historical legacies. Whether that be slavery, various forms of racial hierarchical segregations, the subjugation of women in patriarchal societies, religious rivalry both between and within various faiths, the hatred and demonization of queer/trans/non-binary folk, or so many other forms, the common thread that transforms hate into actual violence, including genocide, is dehumanization.
Glazer found inspiration to stand against dehumanization in Jewish history, where, whether due to particular readings of the Gospels, white nationalism, political manipulation, or simply a hate of the other, Jews have been dehumanized in many different countries and circumstances.
Glazer, in fact, raised his Jewish identity as something that he and his colleagues refused to allow to be transformed into a tool for that dehumanization. He used it as a shining beacon to resist dehumanization of anyone, a universalism that post-Haskalah (sometimes called the Jewish Enlightenment) Judaism has epitomized very powerfully. In short, Glazer put a reverence and respect on Judaism that is beyond the understanding of his critics.
That Glazer also was moved to point out that the Holocaust should be an example of dehumanization that teaches us not to repeat the sins of the past was his way of pointing to that very repetition today and calling for it to stop.
The scorn, the insults, and the ridicule that come from his critics, be they on the right like Flayton or from among pseudo-liberals like Ungar-Sargon, Cohen, and Foxman is a truly antisemitic statement. It denies the role dehumanization played in the Holocaust, a role so central that genocidal horror could not have happened without it, and thereby denies the full scope of the Holocaust itself.
But most of all, by insisting that Judaism must be a genocidal force in Gaza today, it makes as antisemitic a statement as any that can possibly be. When Foxman said “Shame on you,” he would have more properly said it to a mirror, one that reflects his own hateful image right next to Ungar-Sargon’s and Cohen’s and all the rest of Glazer’s critics that agree with more than 2/3 of Israeli Jews who want to continue starving the children of Gaza.
News Roundup
The Left Is Finally Building A Response to AIPAC
By Akila Lacy, The Intercept, March 11, 2024, https://theintercept.com/2024/03/11/reject-aipac-democratic-party-israel-progressives/
Journalism out, hasbara in: How Israeli TV news joined the Gaza war effort
By Eyal Lurie-Pardes, +972 Magazine, March 6, 2024,
https://www.972mag.com/israeli-tv-hasbara-media-gaza/
UN expert: Israel is engineering famine in Gaza
By David Kattenburg, Mondoweiss, March 11, 2024, https://mondoweiss.net/2024/03/un-expert-israel-is-engineering-famine-in-gaza/
Iron bars, electric shocks, dogs and cigarette burns: How Palestinians are tortured in Israeli detention
By Ahmed Aziz, Lubna Masarwa and Simon Hooper, Middle East Eye, March 11, 2024, https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/iron-bars-electric-shocks-dogs-and-cigarette-burns-how-palestinians-are-tortured-israeli-detention
On air, Biden walks back his own Rafah 'red line' in real time
By Daniel Larison, Responsible Statecraft, March 11, 2024, https://responsiblestatecraft.org/biden-red-line-rafah/
Secret of Palestinian Resistance – Why is Gaza Able to Fight for Years to Come
Staff, Palestine Chronicle, March 11, 2024,
https://www.palestinechronicle.com/secret-of-palestinian-resistance-why-is-gaza-able-to-fight-for-years-to-come-analysis/
Israeli forces beat Palestinians entering Al-Aqsa Mosque, forcing worshippers to pray outside
Staff, The New Arab, March 11, 2024,
https://www.newarab.com/news/israeli-forces-beat-worshippers-entering-al-aqsa-mosque
My Latest Articles
Replacing Netanyahu with Gantz won’t fix the problem
My report on Gantz’s trip to the US and UK and what it means politically, in Israel, in the United States, and in Gaza. I make it clear that Gantz might be more respectful to Biden, but his policy toward the Palestinians is pretty much the same.
https://mondoweiss.net/2024/03/replacing-netanyahu-with-gantz-wont-fix-the-problem/
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